Prague Centre for Jewish Studies

In this paper, I examine the changing role of apostates in medieval Jewish-Christian polemic. Using three case studies, I suggest that Jewish converts to Christianity were not merely instruments in the hands of Christian theologians. Rather, they were self-conscious participants in the debate with their own aims and purposes. Far from disowning their Jewish past, they used it in order to mould the debate and influence Christian perceptions of post-biblical Judaism. Analysing their argumentation, it is thus possible to identify traces of conflict and dissonance within Jewish communities.

The aim of the workshop is to examine the attempts of Jewish scholars to delineate the role of philosophical inquiry in medieval Jewish religious practice, and the ways in which philosophical motifs and vocabulary were appropriated and employed by Jews to construct and represent both Jewish and non-Jewish religious identity. The inquiry will focus on the Jewish reception of ancient, Islamic and scholastic epistemological and psychological theories, and on their significance for the description and interpretation of the specific internal and psychological dynamics of the religious life, and on the relationship between rational knowledge and other modes of cognition. Among the areas and questions explored will be: What was the role in medieval Judaism of the definition of internal, spiritual life as a philosophically informed aspiration? To what extent did philosophical theories offer medieval Jews tools for a better understanding of traditional religious concept and practices, especially those associated with the qualities and structure of human soul and with the human capacity to enter in contact with God (e.g. through dream, prophecy, prayer)? When describing the dynamics of spiritual life, how did philosophical terminology intersect with the language of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah? How could philosophy and philosophical concepts be used in explaining or justifying religious conversion? How did the reception of philosophical theories inform the relationship of medieval Judaism to different religious traditions? How did the interplay between philosophical ideas and ethical and psychological religious discourses contribute to the popularisation of philosophical theories and texts among broader strata of Jewish society? We welcome contributions covering and comparing different geographical areas inhabited by the Jews (Ashkenaz, Sefarad, the Land of Israel, etc.) throughout the High and Late Middle Ages, including work in progress and PhD projects. The participants will include: Ofer Elior (Jerusalem), Michael Engel (Hamburg), Yehuda Halper (Bar Ilan), Yossef Schwartz (Tel Aviv), Shalom Sadik (Beer Sheva), Tamás Visi (Olomouc) Please send your paper proposals by 3 March 2017 to Milan Žonca, [email protected].

The article explores Christian anti-Jewish polemic and violence in fourteenth-century Prague and particularly the events of 1389 through the few surviving sources that carry the memories of what happened in the two communities: a Latin parodic account, Passio Judaeorum Pragensium, on the one hand, and the Hebrew elegy of the local Jewish scholar Avigdor Kara, All the Afflictions, on the other. By placing the attack in the context of Easter celebrations, Milan Žonca shows how liturgies produced a particular imagination of the Other. He examines how this imagination resonated with contemporary religious debates, especially those surrounding the Eucharist and frequent communion, and shaped Christian memories of the attack and its interpretations.

Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen, a Jewish scholar active in Prague at the turn of the fifteenth century, is best known as a religious polemicist thanks to his widely disseminated Sefer Niẓẓaḥon (The Book of Polemic). In this article, I argue that despite the important place assigned to arguments against Christianity in Sefer Niẓẓaḥon, inter-religious polemic constitutes only one facet of a much broader project embodied by the book’s structure and content, a project that fits very well with Lipman’s interest in the integration of philosophical and Kabbalistic knowledge expressed in his other works. Lipman’s primary aim in Sefer Niẓẓaḥon was to popularise among wider strata of Ashkenazic society a rationalistic interpretation of Jewish religion based on the writings of Maimonides. He chose to respond to what he perceived as the short-comings of late-medieval Ashkenazic religiosity, especially its use of anthropomorphic expressions in prayer and literal interpretation of Talmudic haggadah, by fashioning Jewish identity as constructed primarily around belief based on carefully delineated theological principles. To underline such vision of the Jewish community, Lipman in his book invoked different classes of dissenters as rhetorical interlocutors. Through the medium of literary polemic, Lipman attempted to address the cultural challenges of his time by imagining communities of ‘others’ and re-imagining his own community. However, this project was not isolated from its non-Jewish intellectual surroundings. Lipman’s repeated criticism of sceptics (meharherim) reflects his awareness of the dangerous potential of unbridled philosophical speculation that may have resonated with the concerns of his Christian contemporaries expressed in the debates on academic heterodoxy, heresy, and their impact on religious community. Furthermore, Lipman’s attitudes to authorship and literary practice parallel approaches employed by some late-medieval Christian theologians, thus suggesting that he should be seen as a participant in a broader literary culture.

This paper presents a commented edition and English translation of a unique document preserved in the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS héb. 242 – a letter written by Prague scholar Avigdor Kara (d. 1432). The brief letter (one manuscript folio) represents a poetic request for financial assistance ad- dressed to members of an unspecified community and describes Kara’s living conditions as a teacher of schoolchildren in the wake of an attack on the Jewish community in his place of residence. The article analyses Kara’s literary de- scription of his occupation in the context of his intellectual interests, as attested in other texts. Furthermore, it suggests that the letter was written in the aftermath of the 1389 Easter attack against the Jews in Prague. The presented edition of this document aims to correct the shortcomings of previous published versions and it supplements them by providing an English translation of the letter.

https://brill.com/view/journals/zuto/aop/article-10.1163-18750214-bja10023/article-10.1163-18750214-bja10023.xml

This article presents an edition of a hitherto unidentified set of commented Hebrew excerpts from Thomas Aquinas’s Sentencia libri De anima. Preserved in the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mich. Add. 25, and attributed to an otherwise unknown Jewish scholar named Israel ben Abraham, the excerpts reproduce the Latin text in different degrees of faithfulness to the original. They do not follow the structure of Aquinas’s commentary and seem to have been summarized and rearranged by the translator to reflect his own interests rooted in the study of Jewish philosophical texts, especially the works of Maimonides and Moses Narboni. In the introduction to the edition, I discuss the context of the excerpts as well as the identity of the translator, including the possibility that he was a Christian convert to Judaism.